Designer Letters

Every house we carry gets visited before it gets bought, and Élise writes the letter the same evening, in a hotel room or a train, before the visit turns into a nicer story than it was. That is the only editorial rule: it goes down before it improves.

What they are not is designer profiles. There is no founding myth and no adjective count. They are notes on a room — how many people were in it, what the light was like, what was on the cutting table, and what the person who runs it said when asked the one question Élise asks everybody, which is what they would still make if nobody bought it.

A few of them

Atelier Loukia — Athens, 2017

Four people, one room off Solonos, and a stack of unsold linen shirts that turned out to be the reason the trousers fit. The first letter, and still the one Élise would rewrite if she could.

Cawley — Somerset, 2021

Hand-smocking done by six women who have done it for thirty years, and a conversation about why a dress takes eleven hours that ended with Élise apologising for a question about margin.

Toteme — Stockholm, 2019

The largest house we visit and the shortest letter. A studio like a dentist’s waiting room, and a wide-leg trouser block that has not changed since we started stocking it, which is the whole point.

A silversmith on Solonos — Athens, 2024

Sofia found him, not Élise, and he asked not to be named until his stock could keep up. Two years later it still cannot. Sixty per cent of the jewellery upstairs is his.

A knitter outside Copenhagen — 2023

Eight machines, one dog, and a refusal to make cashmere in any colour that had been popular the previous year. We buy less from them than we could sell.

A mill in Biella — 2022

Not a designer at all. Where four of our coats come from before anybody cuts them, and the reason we can tell you what a lining is made of.

What we take down

We publish the ones the maker has read. Two houses have asked us to take a letter down — one because it named a fabric price and one because it described a room as cramped, which it was. Both came down the same day. We would rather lose a letter than a workshop that lets us in.

If you want them as they appear, they go out inside the Friday letter. There is no separate list and there never will be, because two lists means writing for two audiences and that is where this sort of thing usually dies.